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CHILDREN IN ADVERTISEMENTS:

Visual representation of children in Time magazine, volumes of 1994, 2004 and 2014.

Master’s Thesis Kati Myllylä

University of Jyväskylä

Department of Language and

Communication Studies

English

June 2017

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JYVÄSKYLÄNYLIOPISTO

Tiedekunta – Faculty

Humanistis-yhteiskuntatieteellinen tiedekunta

Laitos – Department

Kieli – ja viestintätieteiden laitos

Tekijä – Author

Kati Myllylä

Työn nimi – Title

CHILDREN IN ADVERTISEMENTS: Visual representation of children in Time magazine, volumes of 1994, 2004 and 2014.

Oppiaine – Subject

Englanti

Työn laji – Level

Pro gradu -tutkielma

Aika – Month and year

Kesäkuu 2017

Sivumäärä – Number of pages

91 sivua + liitteet 8 sivua

Tiivistelmä – Abstract

Mainosten representaatiot vaikuttavat käsitykseemme itsestämme ja muista. Vaikka mainontaa on tutkittu laajasti, lapsia ja mainontaa on tutkittu lähinnä siitä näkökulmasta, millaisia

mainoksia lapsille on suunnattu tai miten mainonta vaikuttaa lapsiin. Tämän tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on tarkastella lasten representaatiota aikuisille suunnatuissa mainoksissa. Lisäksi halutaan selvittää ovatko mainokset muuttuneet vuosien aikana.

Tutkimuksen aineistona ovat Time-lehden vuosikerrat 1994, 2004 ja 2014. Aineistossa on kaiken kaikkiaan 80 erillistä mainosta, joiden pohjalta tyypillinen representaatio luotiin.

Kyseisinä vuosina mainosmäärät aikajärjestyksessä olivat: 19, 37 ja 24.

Teoreettinen viitekehys pohjautuu vahvasti Kress ja van Leeuwenin visuaaliseen kielioppiin.

Visuaalisen kieliopin avulla aineiston mainokset pystyttiin koodaamaan noudattaen laadullisen sisällönanalyysin työvaiheita. Metodologisesti työ on siis laadullinen, mutta myös määrällinen.

Analyysin aikaisessa vaiheessa aineistosta nousi induktiivisesti esille tietyt toistuvat asiat, joiden pohjalta - ja visuaalisen kieliopin termejä deduktiivisesti lainaten - luotiin kategorioita.

Kategoriat nimettiin Tyypeiksi (Types). Vuosittainen vertailu toteutettiin sekä tutkimalla mainostettavia asioita että käyttämällä Tyyppejä.

Tulokset osoittivat että tyypillisesti mainoksissa lapsi ei katso lukijaan, vaan antaa lukijan katsella itseään rauhassa. Lisäksi lapsi on rajattu lähikuvaan luoden tunteen läheisyydestä ja tuttuudesta. Kuvauskulma on edestä ja lukijan tasolla: läheisyyden tunnetta voimistetaan

nostamatta lukijaa tai lasta korkeampaan voima-asemaan toiseensa nähden. Enimmäkseen lapset olivat kuvissa kuvien osina eivätkä niinkään toimijoina. Tyypeille löydettiin niille asetettuja perusteluita ja olettamuksia, joten voidaan sanoa että Tyyppien kaltaisia lasten representaatioita löytyy mainoksista. Vuosittainen vertailu ei tuottanut yhtä vahvoja tuloksia, sillä vuosittainen aineisto oli pienempi. Teknologia, matkustaminen ja turismi, sekä hyväntekeväisyys olivat kaikissa vuosikerrassa suosituimpia mainostettuja asioita.

Asiasanat – Keywords

Advertising, children, representation, grammar of visual design, Kress and van Leeuwen Säilytyspaikka – Depository

JYX

Muita tietoja – Additional information

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Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION ... 6

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT ... 9

2.1 KEY TERMS ... 9

2.1.1 Representation ... 9

2.1.2 Western Culture ... 10

2.1.3 Advertising ... 11

2.2 CHILDREN AND CONSUMERISM ... 12

2.3 CHILDREN IN ADVERTISEMENTS ... 15

2.4 KRESS AND VAN LEEUWEN’S GRAMMAR OF VISUAL DESIGN ... 17

2.4.1 Narrative and Conceptual Representations ... 19

2.4.2 Representation and Interaction ... 21

2.4.3 Composition of the Image ... 23

2.4.4 Material and Colour ... 25

3. METHODOLOGY ... 27

3.1 AIMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ... 27

3.2 DATA SELECTION AND COLLECTION: TIME MAGAZINE ... 28

3.3 METHODS OF ANALYSIS ... 31

3.3.1 Qualitative Content Analysis ... 32

3.3.2 Introducing the Different Types ... 33

4. THE ANALYSIS ... 35

4.1 ANALYSIS PROCEDURE ... 36

4.2 THE TYPICAL CHILD REPRESENTATION ... 39

4.3 ANALYSIS BY TYPES ... 45

4.3.1 The Demanding type ... 46

4.3.2 The Active Type ... 50

4.3.3 The Object Type ... 55

4.3.4 The Background Type ... 60

4.3.5 Summary and Comparison ... 65

4.4 COMPARISON THROUGHOUT THE YEARS ... 67

4.4.1 Advertisements throughout the years by their topics ... 68

4.4.2 Advertisements throughout the years by their types... 74

5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION ... 78

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5.1 FINDINGS OF THE STUDY IN RELATION WITH THE RESEARCH

QUESTIONS ... 78

5.2 FINDINGS OF THIS STUDY IN RELATION WITH OTHER RESEARCH ... 80

5.3 LIMITATIONS OF THIS STUDY AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH ... 82

5.4 CLOSING WORDS AND THOUGHTS ... 84

BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 85

APPENDICES ... 92

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Tables and Figures

Table 1 Summary of source material ... 29

Table 2 The number of advertisements by types ... 34

Table 3 Extract of Spreadsheet 1.1 ... 38

Table 4 Extract of Spreadsheet 1.2 ... 39

Table 5 Representation and Interaction, results; all volumes included ... 40

Table 6 Narrative and Conceptual representations, results; all volumes included .... 43

Table 7 Realisations of Representation and Interaction in Demanding type advertisements, all volumes included ... 47

Table 8 Realisations of Narrative and Conceptual representations in Demanding type, all volumes included... 49

Table 9 The realisations of Representation and Interaction in Active type, all volumes included ... 51

Table 10 The realisations of Narrative and conceptual representations in Active type, all volumes included ... 53

Table 11 The realisations of Representation and Interaction in Object type, all volumes included ... 56

Table 12 The realisations of Narrative and Conceptual representations in Object type, all volumes included ... 59

Table 13 The realisations of Representation and Interaction in Background type, all volumes included ... 61

Table 14 The realisations of Narrative and Conceptual representations in Background type, all volumes included ... 63

Table 15 Advertisers in 1994 ... 69

Table 16 Advertisers in 2004 ... 69

Table 17 Advertisers in 2014 ... 70

Figure 1 Advertising Topics in 1994 ... 71

Figure 2 Advertising Topics in 2004 ... 72

Figure 3 Advertising Topics in 2014 ... 73

Figure 4 The Distribution of Types in 1994 ... 74

Figure 5 The Distribution of Types in 2004 ... 75

Figure 6 The Distribution of Types in 2014 ... 76

Figure 7 Percentual Differences ... 77

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1. INTRODUCTION

Advertisements are ubiquitous. The radio, TV, cinema, YouTube, Spotify, the sides of buses, windows, posters, neon lights, the applications on one’s mobile phone, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, online games – all of them are filled with advertisements. It can be questioned whether there is a place left that would not be exposed to advertising. The extent of advertising has resulted in advertising becoming a popular research and discussion topic. Some topics have received more attention than others, for example, gender images and representations of women and/or men have been extensively studied and reported on. How different groups of people respond to advertisements has also been a popular study object. The focus of this research paper is, however, one that has not been widely studied: how children are visually represented in advertisements aimed at adults.

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss and research advertisements with representations of children. The advertisements are examined by making use of Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar which they presented in 1996. The Visual Grammar is a systematic grammar of visual design and a demonstration of how meanings are created through visual traditions and regularities in Western image composing. By Western visual tradition and culture, Kress and van Leeuwen do not refer to cultures of specific countries, but to a visual resource that has globally spread.

It is like any other grammars that are commonly associated with linguistics: it is both a description of how elements are used and as well as a set of rules. It does not take a moral stand or criticise the choices made by the creator of an advertisement, but provides a way to approach the subject objectively and to create a neutral description of how, in this case, children are depicted. It does not, for example, focus on why there is a child in an advertisement, what might be the reasons ‘behind the curtains’ or what the consequences are to society of using a child representation. However, since their grammar is based on how visual images are built in Western cultures, the Visual Grammar not only enables studying images systematically, but also reveals the motives behind creating an image in a certain way.

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In the previous studies about children and advertising, children are seen as potential consumers or as targets or even victims of advertising. There are concerns expressed over advertising to children and how our society raises the consumers of the future (see e.g. Linn 2005, Thomas 2007, Gunter and Furnham 1998, Acuff and Reiher 2005), and also apprehensions of how presenting children in advertisements can endanger

“the innocent childhood” by for example sexualising the image of a child (see e.g.

Faulkner 2011, Holland 2004, Merskin 2004, Vänskä 2012). Moreover, in the previous studies the profile of how children are represented in advertisements is either quite outdated (Hood, Heinzerling, Chandler and Hausknecht 1995), based on just one material source, which affects the profile inevitably (O’Dell 2008, Vänskä 2012) or the target audience of the advertisements is children (Jennings and Wartela 2007, Strasburger, Wilson and Jordan 2009). The aim of this study is to create a more versatile profile and, in a way, contribute to the profiles that others have already created.

In order to research representations of children in advertisements, three volumes of Time magazine were selected; volumes of 1994, 2004 and 2014. These three volumes were chosen not only to create a versatile profile of a child representation, but also to enable a comparative discussion between years. Moreover, as the aim of this study is to examine advertisements that are not aimed at children, but the targeted audience is an adult one, Time magazine is decidedly a valid data source. Furthermore, as the Visual Grammar is a grammar of Western visual literacy tradition, the optimal data source was decided to be a Western one as well. Altogether 80 individual advertisements were discovered; 19 in volume 1994, 37 in volume 2004 and 24 in volume 2014.

To discuss the representations of children in advertisements, I created a classification system of my own and labelled the different categories as Types. These Types were formed inductively by a preliminary analysis of the data in this study and deductively by following the rules of Visual Grammar set up by Kress and van Leeuwen.

However, even though the Types follow the Visual Grammar, they are my own construction. Generating the Types was motivated by two different positions: firstly,

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by aiming to create a comprehensive example of the visual representation of children and secondly, by aiming to aid the comparison between different years.

The analytical method of the present study is qualitative content analysis. Qualitative content analysis enables a qualitative way to describe a large data by creating a systematic description of data using a coding frame. It reduces the data by focusing on certain, predetermined aspects and by reducing the data, examining and describing this amount of material becomes possible. The coding frame of this study is both concept- and data-driven; concept-driven categories for the coding frame were taken directly from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar. The data-driven categories, on the other hand, are the Types introduced in the previous paragraph. By applying the coding frame to the material results in numeric data, which makes this study also a quantitative one. In the present study, the numeric data enables discussion and comparison, firstly of all the data, secondly, between the Types and, finally, between the different volumes. In other words, this study is both a qualitative and quantitative one.

All in all, both the position of advertising in the world today and the small attention to how children are represented in them argue for a valid thesis topic. As one cannot escape advertising, it follows that one cannot help being influenced by advertising, either. The images we see in advertisements each day both contribute to and reflect on how we see the world around us, what we believe to be valuable and how we see ourselves as part of that world. Therefore, it is important to study advertising and to become more conscious of the representations offered to us.

This study consists of six chapters. Chapter two focuses on the theoretical background of this study: a short description of advertising, previous studies about children and consumerism and children in advertisements. Chapter two also focuses on presenting the Visual Grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen. After presenting the theoretical background, Chapter three firstly focuses on the aims and research questions, secondly on the data selection and collection and lastly on the methodology applied to this study. Chapter four includes the main analysis of this study which is divided into four parts: explaining the analysis procedure, introducing the average

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representation of a child, discussion of the findings in relation to the Types, and comparison throughout the years. Finally, in Chapter five, the findings of this study will be discussed in relation to the research questions and previous research and the limitations of this study will be addressed with suggestions for future research.

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT

In this chapter, the theoretical background of the present study and the context, in which the present study belongs, are introduced. There are a few important and complex terms that require a definition; representation, advertising and Western culture. These will be discussed first. Secondly, previous studies about children and advertising will be discussed and revised. Finally, Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design will be presented.

2.1 KEY TERMS

The analysis in this study will be looking into representations of children in Western advertisements. Therefore, it is important to discuss early on what representation, advertising and ‘Western’ are understood to be in this thesis. First, representation will be briefly explained. Secondly, the discussion will move on to defining Western culture. Finally, the focus will move on to advertising. The descriptions are left short, even though all of these important terms are really versatile and interesting topics, but in depth discussions would be outside the scope of the present study.

2.1.1 Representation

Representation by its simplest definition means how things are portrayed. In some studies, portrayals are even used as synonyms for representations. These portrayals can be expressed, for example, through written or spoken language or through visual

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forms. In the heart of it all is meaning-making and communicating to each other – how we signal representations to each other.

There are some aspects that are lost when referring to representations just as portrayals. Most importantly for the present study, representations are not just depictions of what they represent, but they are always depended on the creators of the representations. Kress and van Leeuwen argue that a representation is “never the

‘whole object’ but only ever its criterial aspects which are represented” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 7). In other words, they believe that when creating a representation, the creator chooses the aspects considered worth a representation. The chosen aspects are evaluated via the cultural, social and psychological history of the creator of the representation (ibid:7).

In short, representation in this study is foremost seen as something motivated by the creators. In other words, the representations of children in the data are motivated by the creators of the advertisements. Moreover, the advertisements and their creators are motivated by the context and medium in which the advertisements are published.

In this study, the context and the medium is Time magazine, which is a Western publication with an adult audience.

2.1.2 Western Culture

Defining the Western culture is a multifaceted topic. When something is referred to being ‘Western’ it is commonly thought to be something of a European origin. Some theories start with Greek philosophers or the Roman Empire, or the beginning of Christianity. Others focus on Western Civilization and its history. Moreover, geographically, ‘Western’ is challenging to judge: is it the Western Europe, the whole of Europe, Americas or Oceania? Furthermore, in the modern, connected world of today where the distances are getting shorter and shorter by the aid of the technology, ideas, ideals and ideologies can spread through the whole globe in an extremely short time. It is difficult to point out where ‘Western’ begins or ends. For example, mass

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media and Western advertising have contributed to the Western culture spreading onto ‘un-Western’ societies as well.

In the present study, the Western culture is seen as a complex mixture of common beliefs, values, habits and behaviour patterns and how these are expressed. The theoretical framework of the present study, Visual Grammar, follows the same definition. In other words, Visual Grammar is based on Western culture and, more specifically, in the tradition of Western visual communication. For example, the positioning of the elements in an image and the meanings attached to these different positions are based on the Western reading paths from left to right and from top to bottom (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 4, 204-208). Moreover, the desired feeling of attachment/detachment between the reader of an image and the represented object is achieved by framing the object either into a close-up or picturing the object in the distance, following the everyday distances Western people tend to keep from each other in their social interaction (ibid: 124-129).

2.1.3 Advertising

Dyer (1982: 2) defines advertising as follows:” In its simplest sense the word 'advertising' means 'drawing attention to something' or notifying or informing somebody of something.” Advertising can also be called as a system designed to produce artificial needs among people to buy things in order to achieve for example happiness and a better life (Dyer 1989: 3, Danesi and Perron 1999: 279) or “[…] a purely commercial text that links images of health, happiness and success with the consumption of marketed brands” (Hackley 2010: 249). Dyer (1982: 2-11) continues that the most commonly known form of advertising is a public announcement but it includes also an individual talking to another. Moreover, Dyer (ibid.) differentiates commercial consumer advertising from public relations, commonly known as PR. In other words, commercial consumer advertising aims to sell goods or services to people, whereas PR endeavours to contribute positively to a person's or an establishment's public image. Danesi and Perron (1999: 278) also have the same

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distinction between commercial advertising and PR, but they wish to make a further distinction between commercial advertising, propaganda and publicity. Propaganda is a diffusion of ideological views, and publicity, “a craft of disseminating any information that concerns a person, group, event, or product through some public medium” (Danesi and Perron 1999: 278).

As discussed above, advertising aims to create needs and raise the status of a brand in order to make the readers buy the products. If creating a brand image is successful, consumers feel the brand to be trustworthy, reliable, and it can lead into a relationship between the brand and the customer (Wells, Burnett and Moriarty 2000:163). In his article, Berger (2011) takes this claim even further: he argues that wearing a certain brand is a choice made to reflect ourselves to others around us and even to ourselves.

For a brand to achieve such a status, it must utilise advertising and make the brand and the ideals of the brand known to an audience. In other words, if brands are in fact so important that we see them to represent ourselves as signals about who we are, advertising is unquestionably a worthy research topic.

In this study, all the examined advertisements are examples of public announcement, since they are taken from a printed magazine and thus intended public. Moreover, there are some examples of publicity announcements and public relations but no examples of propaganda. However, since the focus of this research paper is on interpreting and discussing advertisements and not on the marketing side, PR and publicity announcements will be classified as advertisements as well and included in the analysis. It could also be argued that PR and publicity are indeed commercial advertisements; after all, they just try (more) indirectly to have an effect on sales by creating a positive image or to collect money for charity organisations.

2.2 CHILDREN AND CONSUMERISM

The topic of advertising and children has been studied mainly from the point of view of a child being a potential consumer, an interpreter of advertising messages or a target of the advertising and consumer culture. These topics are common in the fields

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of economics, sociology and psychology. In other words, the focus of studying advertising and children has been on how children influence their families that are in the decision-making process of purchasing something, and on how children comprehend advertisements' messages and/or are affected by them. In this section I will introduce some exemplar studies on the subject, ranging from advertising to children to children as consumers.

When advertising to children, children can be seen as a primary market, an influence market or a future market. A primary market refers to children being the consumers themselves. As an influence market children are hoped to have an effect on their parents, thus resulting in purchasing. If referred as a future market, the marketing efforts are invested in the hope of the child buying the product later in life, also called as ‘cradle-to-grave’ marketing where the intention is for a life-time loyalty for a brand (Gunter and Furnham 1998: 166, Strasburger, Wilson and Jordan 2009: 44-46)).

However, it can be argued that advertising to children is always more or less advertising to the parents, since children rarely the finances of their own but the money they have available comes from their parents. There are two approaches:

firstly, marketing things that are for the child’s use or pleasure (for example diapers and toys) and are bought for the child by the parents with good intentions and secondly, marketing a wide variety of items to a child so that the child brings the thing to the parents’ attention. Thomas discusses how marketing ‘educational’ toys has been a massive success even though studies have revealed that there is no actual gain from using toys labelled as educational, on the contrary, there are suggestions that flashing toys and being constantly exposed to different medias might even lead to cognitive problems (Thomas 2007: 11-12). It is a great example of how marketing something to children is actually marketing something to the parents.

Advertising targeted specifically to children is at times a topic approached in quite populistic ways. For example, in her book, psychologist Susan Linn launches an attack on Northern American advertising aimed at children. She “goes undercover”

attending a conference on marketing to children, revealing how there is no ethical discussion involved (Linn 2005: 11-30). The last chapter on her book is dedicated to

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giving practical advice on how to protect children from advertising, aiming her advice to parents, foundations and professionals that work with children (Linn 2005: 195- 219). Even if one did not take a moral stand and go on a crusade against advertising to children, it should be recognised that children are indisputably influenced by advertising. For example, children are not able to tell the difference between a TV- programme and an advertisement until the age of five (Muehling and Kolbe 1999: 143, John 1999: 5-7, Jennings and Wartela 2007: 161). Another example of children being affected by advertising is brand recognition. Children in kindergarten can already identify brands of adult and children products (Hackley 2010: 238) and by the age of two children are able to ask for specific brands (Thomas 2007: 5). If these findings are combined with Berger’s (2011) claim that we see brands as part of ourselves, it is unarguable that advertising and children should indeed be a significant and important object of study.

In addition to the concerns of children being affected and childhood being threatened by advertising, there is a concern for society to take responsibility for the growing future consumers. Children are exposed to consumerism and advertising from a young age: the process of becoming a consumer begins early on. Gunter and Furnham emphasize the role of the parents, suggesting that consumer education should be directed at parents since the parents’ example as a consumer is the most influential for the child (Gunter and Furnham 1998: 15-34). On the other hand, Hackley, although admitting that children are in fact affected by advertising, questions whether being exposed to advertising is one aspect of growing up into a consumer and thus should not be banned from children (2010: 238).

Furthermore, the themes of innocence that have been associated with the idea of childhood in the Western cultures are a powerful selling mechanism in advertising.

Innocence is almost an obsession, and innocence sells. Faulkner, for example, speaks of “trading on childhood innocence to sell commodities” (Faulkner 2011: 137), Holland argues for “the loss of innocence and of childishness itself” (Holland 2004:

20) and Vänskä claims that by choosing to use a child in an advertisement a company can be assured to catch the eye of the reader (Vänskä 2012: 75). The innocence of

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childhood is most often understood to be the opposite of sexuality. There are concerns not only for our media filled modern time “ruining” this innocence with sexually loaded content but also for the sexualisation of children themselves in advertising.

Merskin calls this a ‘Lolita-effect’ and debates over the problematics of children posing in questionable ways possibly being linked with paedophilia: “Similar to content that is regarded as "kiddie porn," sexualized images of girls in advertisements have the potential to contribute to the ongoing and increasing problem of child sexual abuse”

(Merskin 2004).

As a summary, children and childhood is frequently seen as something that needs to be protected from advertising. Since the aim of this study is to examine how advertisements represent children, my analysis does not add anything to this specific discussion. On the other hand, as advertising is considered to such an influential part of our culture and society, all the more essential and important it is to study all aspects of it.

2.3 CHILDREN IN ADVERTISEMENTS

The number of studies about how children are visually represented in advertisements aimed at an adult audience that I was able to locate was sparse. There have been, however, numerous studies of how children are represented in advertisements aimed at children. The studies that had similar aim of the present study had their own limitations. In this chapter, these studies will be presented.

In advertisements aimed at children, the representation of a child is quite stereotypical in terms of gender, especially when advertising toys. In advertisements of toys for boys, the boys were represented as active, noisy and even wild, whereas in advertisements of toys for girls the girls were quieter, the actions were slow paced and the general atmosphere was softer. Moreover, in the settings of the advertisements boys tend to be outside, ‘adventuring’, whereas girls are at home ‘nurturing’ (Jennings and Wartela 2007: 157-160, Smith 1994, Strasburger, Wilson and Jordan 2009: 49-53, Walsh and Ward 2008: 149-151).

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Two studies worth mentioning were a content analysis by Hood, Heinzerling, Chandler and Hausknecht (1995) and an analysis by O’Dell (2008). The analysis by Hood et al. examined advertisements with children on them from 1953 through 1988.

However, their study methods were highly quantitative and focused on aspects such as the gender and the ethnical backgrounds of the children. The results of how children are visually represented were narrowed down to only two aspects: what activities children were doing and what products or services were being promoted.

How children in fact looked like was merely reviewed by whether the child was represented as a ‘miniature adult’ or as ‘decorative prop’. Moreover, they did not focus on how the images themselves were designed. On the other hand, the analysis by O’Dell focused mostly on the texts found in the advertisements and not on the visual images. Additionally, the analysed advertisements were a series of charity advertisements for a foundation helping the victims of child abuse resulting in the profile of a child based on just one advertising campaign. The focus of O’Dell’s study was also on how the negative representations of children, representing the children as damaged, can affect the abuse victims even at an adult age, instead of concentrating on the visual designs of the advertisements. In the present study the aim is to create on one hand, a more versatile, and on the other hand, a more comprehensive picture of how children are visually represented than in the two studies discussed in this paragraph.

The most versatile research on the topic of children in advertisements located was a study of fashion advertisements by Vänskä (2012). The themes of innocence that were touched upon in Chapter 2.2 are also one of the main topics in Vänskä’s study. She studies the representations of children and symbolic childhood in fashion advertisements. Her study covers various topics such as heteronormativity (166-169), colours and activities associated with girls (pink, being passive) and with boys (blue, active doers) (93-104) and queer trends (181-203). She accomplishes to create a richly detailed and versatile image of how children are represented in fashion advertisements with example advertisements from the 1970’s to 2010. However, even though Vänskä claims that her research data consisting of fashion advertisements can

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be seen to represent the values and views of our time (Vänskä 2012: 23), it can be argued that her data sets limitations to her interpretations. The advertisements that she has included in her study as examples include highly provocative which are more or less characteristic to high-end fashion, and all the advertisements are targeted at a distinct audience (readers of fashion magazines). The image of childhood and children surely reflects the choice of source material.

In conclusion, the previous studies of children and childhood in advertisements had either quite different research material or different approaches and focuses than in the present study. Moreover, the research material of this study is mostly more recent than in the other studies and thus reflects the culture and society of today more closely. As the aim of this study is to describe the representations of children more in the terms of structure than, for example, to review implications of representations contributing to the self-images of children, or to discuss the sexualisation of childhood or the loss of innocence, this study has additional contribution to the topic.

2.4 KRESS AND VAN LEEUWEN’S GRAMMAR OF VISUAL DESIGN

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design was first published in 1996. The second edition, which this study largely builds on, was released in 2006 and a third edition is supposedly published in year 2017. Their aim was, as the title announces, to create a systematic grammar of visual design and to demonstrate how meanings are created through visual traditions and regularities in the image composing in the Western social contexts. In other words, they explain how for example colour, perspective, framing and composition communicate meaning in images.

One of the main arguments presented is that there has been a “semiotic revolution”

where the preference has shifted to communicating ideas in new complex visual ways instead of for example expressing things iconically (i.e. “as they are”, for example in portraits and graphically unaltered photos). Images have become more coded and they are used in the propagandistic purpose. In other words, there has been “a shift

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from uncoded naturalistic representations to stylised, conceptual images which can be seen for example on the covers of magazines” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 29- 30). Moreover, the prestige of written text has diminished whereas communicating through images has become increasingly more acceptable, and in some instances even more valued than written texts, like in scientific texts – an image can explain and illustrate. In other words, the semiotic mode of writing is challenged, or even threatened, by visual modes. Therefore, there is a demand for visual literacy and visual theories such as Kress and van Leeuwen’s ‘Visual Grammar’ – it benefits the designers, the readers and the researchers of images.

Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory builds greatly on social semiotics, in other words, how meanings are created and communicated in a society that shares mutual codes.

They call this the semiotic landscape. The semiotic landscape is characterised, on the one hand, by the range of forms or modes of public communication available in a society and, on the other hand, by the uses and valuations of those forms or modes (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 35). Furthermore, from this follows that signs are never arbitrary but are motivated by intentions of the creators of signs.

There are some main categories in their Visual Grammar that will be made use of in this study. These categories are: firstly, narrative and conceptual representations, secondly, representation and interaction, thirdly, composition, and finally, materiality and colour. Narrative and conceptual representations refer to deciding whether an image is ‘telling a story’ or ‘presenting a thing’. Representation and interaction are about how a viewer of an image relates to the content of the image. Composition includes the participants in an image and how those participants relate to each other.

Materiality and colour explain how different choices between material and colour options can convey different meanings. The following section will be dedicated to discussing and explaining these categories in detail. It is to be noted that as images are considered to be texts containing meanings in this study, the viewer and reader of an image refer to the same thing: a person looking at an image.

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2.4.1 Narrative and Conceptual Representations

All images or visual structures are either narrative or conceptual representations. If an image is depicting an event or an action it is a narrative representation, whereas in a conceptual representation the participants are presented as static and timeless in terms of class, structure or meaning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 59, 79).

In narrative representations the actions or events are created by vectors, oblique lines.

A vector can be for example a gaze, a gesture, a posture, an arrow, an abstract form – anything that points to a direction and forms an oblique line. Kress and van Leeuwen have described different kind of narrative processes based on vectors in images and of these, two types of processes are relevant for this study: Action process and Reactional process. Action process can be further divided into transactional and non- transactional processes. In a transactional structure the vector is originated from a participant called the Actor and it is pointing to another participant called the Goal.

An image can also be bidirectional if there are two Actors that act simultaneously as Goals, for example two persons pointing at each other (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006:

63-64). If the vector is missing a Goal, for example the Actor is forming a vector by pointing at a thing not shown in the image, it is called a non-transactional structure (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 63). In Reactional processes the vector is formed by an eye line, by gaze. The person (or something with eyelike things) looking at something is called the Reacter and the object of the gaze is called the Phenomena. A reactional process can also be divided into transactional or non-transactional ones: if both the Reacter and Phenomena are present, the image is a transactional one and if the Phenomena is absent from the picture, it is a non-transactional one (ibid: 67). Similarly, if there are two Reacters gazing at each other, the picture is bidirectional.

Conceptual representations can be divided into Classification, Analytical and Symbolic processes (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 79-110). Classification processes aim to display how different elements are related to each other. The relation between different elements can be equal, which is called covert taxonomy. In pictures with covert taxonomy, all the elements are equally divided in a picture both horizontally and vertically. If just one element is above other elements, it is called the

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superordinate and other elements are its subordinates. This is called a single-levelled taxonomy. If there are subordinates that have subordinates of their own, in other words there are elements also beneath them, the structure is called a multi-levelled overt taxonomy. An element that acts both as a subordinate and as a superordinate can be referred to as an interordinate. (Ibid.: 79-87)

Analytical processes, on the other hand, display an image as a part-whole structure.

There is a Carrier, that is the ‘whole’, and other complimentary elements called Possessive Attributes, that are the ‘parts’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 87) For example, blueprints have this part-whole structure. A blueprint of a house represents the whole house – the Carrier – with its different rooms, floors, walls and so on – the Possessive Attributes, the parts of the house. If the Carrier is missing, the process is called unstructured (ibid: 92-94).

According to Kress and van Leeuwen, symbolic processes have either a Carrier with Symbolic Attributes -structure or they are Symbolic Suggestive. Symbolic Attributes include elements that are obviously symbolic, even though symbolic elements are not naturally always obvious (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 105). The items and objects that are considered to be symbolic depend greatly on a culture. For example, in Christian societies the fish symbol can refer to Jesus, which is a completely irrational connection if one is not familiar with the lore of the Christian religion. Another feature that is characteristic to a Symbolic Attribute is that it is salient and therefore an unmissable element. A Symbolic Attribute can also be made more prominent by it being pointed at by other elements in a way that has no other purpose than to point out and emphasize the Symbolic Attribute. The Symbolic Attribute might just stand out by being completely out of place in the whole, being an unconventional element in its setting. If a human is represented as a Symbolic Attribute, s/he is presented in a way that s/he seems to be doing nothing but ‘just being’ and to be looked at by the reader. In Symbolic Suggestive Processes, on the other hand, only the Carrier is displayed and they emphasize a ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 105-107). They cannot be analytical and do not have attributes since the details

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have been embedded by, for example, using a colour scheme that makes the whole image blurred and the details blend into the image.

It is to be noted that different kinds of processes may occur simultaneously in a single image. Different participants in an image may form different kinds of structures and play more roles than one within one single image. Kress and van Leeuwen point out that there might be ‘major’ and ‘minor’ processes in a single image, where these different processes might be, for example, both analytical and narrative in their part, creating major and minor messages (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006:107, 109).

2.4.2 Representation and Interaction

Meanings in an image are created also by how the reader of an image relates to the image. Even though the relationship between the creator and the reader of an image might remain vague, there is always a relationship between the reader of an image and the represented object in an image, and the reader interacts with the represented object. This interaction is realized through different methods: an image can be either a demand or an offer image, choosing between different sizes of frames, and the images carrying a certain attitude. How these different methods are carried out and how they affect the relationship between the represented object and the reader is discussed next.

The keyword for demand and offer images is contact: what kind of a contact is created between the reader of an image and the represented participant. In order to an image to be a demand image the represented object looks directly at the reader of an image – there is a demand for connection between the reader and the represented object by the gaze (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 117-127)). It is important to note that the represented object has to have eyes (or eyelike things e.g. lightbulb eyes of a robot) to actually perform a gaze. Conversely, in an offer image, the represented object in an image does not look at the reader of an image – the represented object offers instead himself or herself to be looked at, reviewed and scrutinized, and allows the reader do it freely (ibid: 119-127). The object’s gaze is averted from the reader or there is no gaze

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at all (e.g. eyes shut or covered). In other words, the difference between demand and offer images is if the represented participant requires a contact with the reader.

The way how an image is framed plays with different social distances and thereby also affects how the reader of an image relates to the represented object in an image.

To put it briefly, the size of the frame means that there is a choice to be made between a close-up (the person’s shoulders and face are shown, also an extreme close-up, big close-up: only the face is visible), a medium shot (medium close shot: the person is cut around the waist, medium shot: at the knees) or a long shot (medium long shot:

shows the whole human, in a long shot the human covers about half the height of the frame, very long shot: the human body covers less than half of the frame) (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 124-129). These different distances of photo shooting follow the rules of everyday interaction and, more precisely, social distances that people keep from each other. Furthermore, these distances are based on the social relationships between people (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 124-125.) If two persons are standing so close to each other that they can touch, this implies an intimate relationship between the persons. This is called a close personal/intimate distance. From this close, the persons can only see each other’s faces and perhaps shoulders. At far personal distance, persons can reach out and touch each other’s fingers and hold conversation about personal topics. Persons see each other from the waist up. If persons are standing slightly farther from each other than in far personal distance, they are at close social distance. Discussion topics are impersonal and persons can see each other’s whole figures. At far social distance discussion topics are formal and impersonal, persons can see the full figures of each other and also the setting around each other. Lastly, public distance is a distance kept between people that are strangers to each other and have no exchange with each other and a person can see the full figures of several other persons (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 124-125) In other words, the closer a represented participant is brought to the reader of an image by framing, the shorter is the social distance created by it, and the more intimate relationship between the reader and the represented participant is intended.

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By attitude, Kress and van Leeuwen refer to a perspective that is created by choosing a point of view horizontally and vertically. If the represented participant is pictured or photographed horizontally from a frontal angle, it invites the reader to be involved.

On the other hand, an oblique angle aims to create a feeling of detachment between the reader and the represented participant. Furthermore, different power positions can be created with different vertical angles. If the reader’s point of view is from a high angle, this puts the viewer in a power position whereas a low angle does the opposite, the viewer or the represented participant seems to be looking down on the other one. In the same way, equality or neutral power positions are formed by an eye- level viewing angle. (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 133-143)

As a summary, the contact between the viewer and the represented participant is defined by an eye contact, the social distance by the size of frame, and the attitude by the point of view. All of these three, contact, social distance and attitude, do not exclude each other but, on the contrary, coexist.

2.4.3 Composition of the Image

In addition to the relations between represented participants (people, places etc.) in an image and the relations between images and their viewers, the composition of the whole image plays an important part. The composition of the whole deals with elements such as how all the represented participants in an image are related to each other, where they are positioned in the image and which of the participants are most noticeable ones and so on. Moreover, the composition of the whole can be divided into three categories: information value, salience and framing. These three categories will be explained next.

Information value refers to the placement of elements and how the different placements carry different informational values, in other words, left and right, top and bottom, centre and margin. These placements are depended on the reading pattern of a Western reader: from left to right. Left and right positions are connected with given and new information with the given/familiar information on the left side of the

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composition and the new/key information on the right side (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006:180). The ideal information is usually situated on the top and the real information at the bottom position (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 186). If centre and margin positioning is used, the centre is the place of independent, nuclear information, on which the information positioned in the margins is depended, and gives additional information of the centre information. This is called centred positioning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 196). If there is no centre, the picture’s composition is called polarized. A visual image can form combinations of these placements at the same time. All in all, the positioning of an element in an image affects the information value of the element in relation to other elements and their respective positioning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 179-201).

The salience of an element makes the element stand out or blend into the background in an image. As the elements in an image are related to each other, the viewer of an image evaluates the importance of each element and thereby judges their salience.

This is done intuitively and cannot be objectively measured. Examples of how an element’s salience can be heightened or lowered are by the use of colours, sharpness of focus, by its size or placement in the image (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 202).

Framing in a visual image relates to how the elements in the picture are yet again connected or separated from each other. An obvious separating method is the usage of blank spaces or other visual frames between elements, whereas if there are no visual gaps between the elements but they are joined, connected to each other as one, they send a message of unity (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 203). In other words, different elements in an image can be either connected of disconnected from each other.

Uniting, in terms of framing, can also be realised through repeating the same shape or colour in different elements in an image. This, again, makes the elements seem more united or connected to each other.

Information value, salience and framing naturally overlap and coexist in images. They are based on the Western tradition on the one hand, and rely on the interpretation of the reader on the other. As Kress and van Leeuwen point out, there are at times no means to predict how an image will be read, for example, from left to right, or by a

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wandering gaze, since images are not read like linear written texts (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 204-208). However, since the material of this study consists of advertisements created for the Western audience, the regularities presented in this chapter will be considered effective tools for the analysis.

2.4.4 Material and Colour

Colours and materials naturally mean something, but there is much dispute over what they mean. There is no right answer. Colours and materials have meanings and occasionally also symbolic values that vary between social and historical contexts and cultures (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 217 and 227). For example, white can be the colour of one’s wedding dress or a funeral shroud. The sayings “nerves of steel” or a

“heart of gold” reveal how these materials are interpreted in our society: steel is durable and hard, gold is rare and desirable. Meaning-making with material will be discussed in detail first in the following paragraphs, followed by the discussion on colour.

In meaning-making with a material, one refers to either the material itself or to material production (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 215). Different materials have different ‘meanings’, different connotations: some materials are experienced to be prestigious, for example precious metals; some materials cheap, such as plastics; some others modern, for example glass and steel in architecture, and so on. In advertising the material production can be, for example, a radio advertisement, a TV commercial, a pop-up window on a webpage, a printed advertisement in a newspaper, email marketing etc. Different forms of the same advertisement are received and interpreted in different ways.

Kress and van Leeuwen claim that colour can be used in two different levels in creating meanings. Firstly, there is a choice to be made between different colours carrying associations and symbolic values that vary in different sociocultural contexts.

Secondly, there is variation between different features of colour. Kress and van Leeuwen call these distinctive features (2006: 233). In other words, in making meaning

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with a colour, one chooses not only the colour but also a way how to use the colour.

The ‘how to use’ is explained by different scales, which are value, saturation, purity, modulation, differentiation and hue.

Value is the grey scale: the scale from the maximum light or white to the maximum dark or black. (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 233)

Saturation is the scale from the most intensely saturated to its softest to complete desaturation. The most intensely saturated colours are pure colours; softer saturations include pale and pastel colour variations, and completely desaturated colours are black and white. Associations play a key role in how different saturations are experienced. To some people, intensely saturated colours may mean vibrant, lively colours while to others they may come across as vulgar or childish. Accordingly, softer saturations can be interpreted either elegant or dull. (Ibid.: 233)

Purity is the scale from purity to hybridity. Pure colours are considered to be colours that can be labelled with just one word, such as blue, green or brown, whereas hybrid colours are mixtures of ‘pure colours’, in other words blue-green aka cyan. (Ibid.: 234) Modulation is the scale where at one end there is a flat colour and on the other end a fully modulated colour. A flat colour presents only one colour in only one shade, and can be found for example in children’s books and comic strips. A modulated colour imitates how the colour is seen ‘in real life’, how the angle of an object, the lighting etc. affects how an object and its colour is observed. In other words, flat colours are abstract colours whereas modulated colours are naturalistic colours. (Ibid.: 234) Differentiation is the scale from monochrome to using a full palette of different colours. (Ibid: 234-235)

Hue is the scale from blue to red. It refers to how the overall tone of an image is, ranging from cold tones to warm ones. These tones create the contrasts between transparent/opaque, sedative/stimulant, rare/dense, airy/earthy, far/near, light/heavy and wet/dry. (Ibid.: 235)

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All in all, besides all of the numerous examples and ways to use a material and colour presented above, it is important to note that material, material production, colour and different features of colour are all made and used by individuals living in their own societies. Thus, the meanings that the creators of signs wish to create cannot easily be predicted and neither can the ways in which the signs are received and interpreted.

As stated in the first paragraph of this chapter, there is no right answer.

3. METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, there are two parts. In the first part the aims and research questions will be introduced. In the second part the discussion will continue to explaining how and where the data for the analysis were collected.

3.1 AIMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The purpose of this study is to try to find a comprehensive way how children are represented visually in advertisements aimed at an adult audience. The presumption is that there is a certain way in which children are represented. There might be roles that are applied to children, assigned places inside advertisements, recurring advertisement topics and so on. Moreover, there is an additional presumption that these ways, roles, etc. have undergone changes throughout the years.

In other words, the research questions in this study are:

1) How are children visually represented in advertisements?

2) Has the way children are represented in advertisements changed between years 1994, 2004 and 2014?

In order to answer the first research questions, the material of this study will be methodologically examined by applying Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design that was introduced in Section 2.4. Moreover, the Visual Grammar will be used

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to create a categorisation system of my own. These categories will be introduced in Section 3.3.2.

The second research question will be answered firstly, by utilising the findings of the first research question and secondly, by looking into the topics and marketed products of the advertisements.

All in all, the aim of this study is to create a more versatile profile than in the previous studies and, in a way, contribute to the profiles that others have already created.

3.2 DATA SELECTION AND COLLECTION: TIME MAGAZINE

As the purpose of this study is to look into children in advertisements to create a comprehensive idea of how children are represented visually in them, I decided to use Time Magazine as a primary source. Time Magazine was created “so that ‘busy men’

could stay informed” and it summarised news of the world until 1930s when it started to produce its own news articles. (History of TIME [online]). The articles in Time Magazine cover national and international news and reflect the society in which the advertisements have been published. The magazine’s cover picture choices and the annual Person of the Year nominations have at times received criticism and debate but overall Time Magazine is commonly regarded as a respectful and trustworthy news publisher and it represents prestige media. In short, it can be argued that Time Magazine is one of the most established publications of the, and thus a valid source for this thesis.

The advertisements for this study were taken from Time Magazine’s International EMEA version also known as Atlantic Overseas edition, from the volumes printed in Amsterdam, published in 1994, 2004 and 2014. The selection of these specific volumes was motivated by two matters: firstly, by the aim of achieving a representation of Western culture in which it is possible to apply Visual Grammar, and secondly, by the question of accessibility. Moreover, as the purpose of this study is also to find out if the ways how children are used in advertisements has changed throughout the years,

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these three different volumes with a ten-year publication gap between them were chosen. Additionally, Time Magazine has been published since year 1923 (History of TIME [online]) and has over 21 million readers worldwide; in addition to the original United States edition there are the European, Asian and South Pacific editions (TIME Media Kit [online]). As it can be argued that Time is a well-established magazine and since these issues were easy to gain access to, it was deemed a sensible decision to use them as a primary source.

The magazines that were examined were printed issues instead of online versions, since the digital version available online included only few of the advertisements found in the printed ones. The issues were collected from Jyväskylä University Library’s archives and the advertisements were scanned to a digital format from them.

Since the printed versions granted an access to the advertisements, the possibility of a page gone missing from an issue or even a whole issue having vanished had to be accepted. Overall, the magazines where in an adequate condition. Moreover, since the aim of this study is to describe the contents of the advertisements, and not to produce statistically significant data, it was deemed a valid decision. Table 1 below summarises the missing issues and their numbers (i.e. the running number of the missing issue, not how many individual issues were missing), the number of double-issues (in a few instances Time was published only every other week with a double-issue) and the total number of issues in each volume.

Table 1 Summary of source material

Volume The number of the

missing issue Number of double-

issues Total number of

available issues

1994 28 0 51

2004 9, 10, 40 1 47

2014 32 6 46

It was not known at this point of the present study that I would not be able to add the scanned advertisements as an Appendix due to copyright limitations. The reader of this study might have benefitted from having the option to have a look at the advertisements but on the other hand, since the analysis of the advertisements does

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not focus on describing each individual advertisement in detail, the absence of the advertisements is tolerable. The reader of the present study can find a comprehensive list of the advertisements in the Bibliography. With the list, the advertisements can be located from the magazines.

It is to be noted that if the same advertisement appeared more than once in the same magazine or in the same volume it was counted only once. The same principle was applied if the same advertisement appeared in a different size or in a form modified in any other way (for example in black and white instead of in colour). The version that I evaluated to be the most expensive version of the advertisement, was judged out to be the original and intended version and was chosen to be analysed. The reason for this was to ignore the effect of different advertisers’ purchase power (i.e. to purchase expensive advertising space). In addition, since the aim was not to find out how much advertising space overall is occupied by advertisements with children on them, but to find examples of advertisements with children and to discover how many such individual advertisements were created to be published within a year, counting a different form of the same advertisement was not sensible. Following the same motive, the advertisements with other represented objects or themes (for example women, the advertised object itself etc.) were not counted, nor was the total number of any kind of advertisements in a volume calculated.

The status of Time characterises the advertisements published in it and creates both pros and cons for this study. Firstly, there is the audience of Time that creates some limitations to the advertisements. The readers of Time are 62% men and 38% women according to the TIME EMEA Reader Profile. 61% of the readers have received an upper education, the average annual household income of the readers is 67,241 euros and the median age is 45 (TIME Media Kit [online]). In other words, when creating an advertisement, an advertiser must have considered the targeted audience; thus the analysed advertisements in this study are generally aimed at the average reader of Time Magazine: male, in early middle age, educated and wealthy. On the other hand, it is rather expensive to publish an advertisement in Time and it argues for a more widespread audience. For example, in 2017 a full-page run-of-book advertisement in

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black and white costs 238,300 U.S. dollars and 366,600 U.S. dollars in colour in the U.S.

National Edition (TIME Media Kit [online]). As it is expensive to advertise in Time, and creating an advertising campaign is a costly investment, it implies a high probability that these advertisements have been published in other media as well, since the company or fund that ordered the advertisement must be reasonably wealthy and own the resources to do it. In other words, it is likely that these advertisements have been rotated for a larger audience than the readers of Time and therefore the outcome of analysing them provides a broader knowledge of advertising in Western societies than just how advertising is in Time.

To sum up, Time Magazine is a good source to represent the Western society, which is a prerequisite for a material source for the type of analysis that is carried out in this study. Even if the reader profile of Time is that of a middle-aged, wealthy male, the cost of advertising in Time and the circulation of tens of millions speak for a wider audience. In addition, the audience of these advertisements is a markedly adult one, so it serves the aim of wanting to find out how children are visually represented in advertisements that are not aimed at children.

3.3 METHODS OF ANALYSIS

In order to answer the research questions, the analysis is divided into three parts:

firstly, there is a discussion of how children are represented in advertisements, secondly, the discussion moves on to explain the findings through Types, and thirdly, the focus is on finding out whether there have been changes throughout the years, either in the Types or in the advertisements in more general terms. The method applied to the first two parts of the analysis is a qualitative content analysis and in the latter part, the method utilised more traditional content analysis. The latter part of the analysis takes advantage of the results gained from the first part. Next it is first explained what a qualitative content analysis is, and secondly a short description follows of how the Types were formed.

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3.3.1 Qualitative Content Analysis

The qualitative content analysis is a method that enables to create a systematic description of data by creating a coding frame. The coding frame is created by assigning segments of the research data to the categories of the coding frame, the coding frame belonging “therefore at the heart of the method” (Schreier 2012: 58). It was decided to be the most useful method for this study firstly, because it reduces the data by focusing on certain, predetermined aspects and, secondly, by reducing the data it enables not only to get a comprehensive idea of this many examples of data but also to examine and describe this amount of material. In other words, it allows a qualitative way to describe a large material base. Moreover, as the purpose of this study is to describe how children are represented in advertisements, not to for example discuss ethics of advertising with children or to examine possible deeper meanings hidden in the images, as is common in more traditional semiotic research, this method was decided to be the most appropriate.

The coding frame of this study is both concept- and data-driven (Schreier 2012: 85 and 87- 90), or, in other words, the coding frame is created working both deductively and inductively (Schreier 2012: 85, 87, Mayring 2000). Concept-driven categories for the coding frame were taken directly from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar.

The data-driven categories, on the other hand, were adapted from Kress and van Leeuwen, but they arose from the material of this study. These data-driven categories are termed Types and will be introduced in Section 3.3.2.

By applying the coding frame to the material results in numeric data, which makes this study also a quantitative one. As stated by Byrne (2016), quantitative research generates numerical data and/or statistics that can be used to generalise results from a sample data. In this study, the numeric data enables discussion and comparison, firstly of all the data, secondly, between the Types and, finally, between the different volumes. However, as the results of the coding frame and the analysis will create semiotic interpretations and meanings based on the Visual Grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen, this study is considered to be both a qualitative and quantitative one.

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3.3.2 Introducing the Different Types

As stated in the previous section, building a coding frame requires forming categories so that the material can be divided and thereby diminished into a smaller amount of material, which is easier to handle and discuss. Moreover, it is necessary to define and clarify exactly what these categories are, in order to make the categories plausible and even potentially repeatable by another user of the same coding frame other than the creator of the coding frame himself/herself. This section will focus on discussing how the category of different Types was formed.

After the division of the advertisements into three main groups, all groups were further divided into four subcategories. These four subcategories were formed by taking a closer, yet a preliminary look into the advertisements and their apparent themes and contents, in other words themes that did not request a deeper analysis.

These themes and contents were decided to be called Types. The Types were labelled as follows: Demanding type, Active type, Object type and Background type. These Types were derived and adapted from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and follow the Visual Grammar’s concepts and ideas, but are not directly taken from Kress and van Leeuwen’s theory. In other words, Kress and van Leeuwen do not have similar typing of images but these types were created by myself. These Types are one basis of my coding frame and thus need to be carefully explained.

In the Demanding type category, the child is requesting a contact with the reader with a noticeable eye-contact. This Type follows Kress and van Leeuwen’s definition of a

‘demand image’, where an eye contact creates a relationship between the reader of the image and the represented person through direct “visual form of direct address” and

“image act” as in the image being used to do something to the reader of the image, here: demanding a relationship with the reader (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006: 117- 118). Otherwise the represented child appears to be passive, despite the outstanding request for eye-contact. In other words, the structure of these Types of advertisements

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